‘Is digital transformation truly possible without digital leaders?’ Late last year I read an article in the Australian Financial Review that left me nodding my head furiously in agreement. The headline was, ‘Why public sector leaders need to change their style’.
It was a joint piece written by AFR journalist Tom Burton, Deloitte’s Simon Cooper, and one of Australia’s leading authorities working at the intersection of policy and public sector reform, Technology and Innovation, Martin Stewart-Weeks @ Public Purpose.
It talked about how the art and practice of public sector leadership was rapidly changing; driven by a perfect storm, if you will, of ongoing digital transformation, COVID and a dramatic shift in citizen expectations for government leaders to be much more visible and accountable.
What the article spelled out beautifully is the notion of a fifth often forgotten yet crucial dimension of leadership in our digital world: whether public or private sector, that is public profile storytelling & engagement. To put it bluntly, leaders today can do a wonderful job driving digital transformation behind the scenes, but if they fail to communicate progress, outcomes or even those speed bumps along the way, they will ultimately fail to win over stakeholders in the accessible searchable digital world we live in.
So unless leaders control the digital narrative around transformation, others will determine whether something is a success or failure. This is such a crucial topic of discussion right now particularly in the public sector, given the need for leaders to adapt to changing expectations around them. For leaders, if service delivery is now a given for audiences, digital storytelling can be your differentiator and secret weapon.
So it was an absolute pleasure to have Martin Stewart-Weeks, Public Purpose on the show to share his wisdom as founder of consultancy Public Purpose, a regular figure on government digital related task forces and boards and someone who has decades of state and federal government experience behind them. Here’s a snapshot from our discussion. I hope you find it as valuable and insightful as I did.
Roger Christie: How would you say the best leaders are communicating both the journey and the destination of digital transformation, to staff, to media, the citizens? What sorts of things are they doing differently that makes them so effective?
Martin Stewart-Weeks: It’s a great question. And certainly I can’t claim to have done a sort of forensic analysis, but I’ve got a lot of experience watching how this happens in the world, certainly in the worlds that I move in. Here are a couple of observations I’d make.
Speed. Intensity. Regularity.
The first one, interestingly, is something around intensity and regularity. Part of the tradition in the public service and in politics, certainly when I started working in this game close to 35-40 years ago, was a tendency for political and economic communication to be relatively rare, relatively senior, and relatively static – a press conference, a press release or speech. By and large, it was an intermittent affair.
What I think we’re seeing in this new world, and in this new thoroughly digital world, is a real art of communicating regularly and quite intensely. Lots of messages, lots of stories, lots of interactions, and often quite small ones. You need to be using often particular moments in the work you’re doing; a goal or a milestone has been achieved in a project. As it happens, out you go and start telling this story. I think part of the skill, the art and practice of this new kind of communication is, if I can coin a phrase, do it early and do it often. That’s one dimension.
Small stories connected to the bigger story.
The second dimension. I think the answer is to start communicating often about relatively small pieces of the story so you can get people to concentrate on what’s happened and what’s been achieved – but then immediately find a way to link it to the big story. Don’t just leave them with the moment of achievement or the thing you’re dealing with or what you’re trying to achieve. You constantly have to move comfortably between the story itself and the broader context in which that story makes sense.
I think effective communication has always been about the ability to link your story with why that story makes sense. And what I find that these new, digitally capable, political and bureaucratic communicators are doing constantly is using small pieces of communication to get this sense of momentum, this sense of progress, but also the sense of context.
They don’t just leave people with one story or picture of the hurrah moment. But rather you are constantly reminded about why that matters and where it’s going and why this is step 43 and step 110 of the program – whatever the context is.
Roger Christie: This really helpful framing and I think also it talks to the journey that a lot of public sector agencies have been on around social media, which is more traditionally towards those larger, big budget, big impact brand campaigns, to today trying to use social media platforms to get targeted reach at scale in a cost effective manner.
So what you’re talking about there in terms of this approach, around small pieces of communications is very counter to the former and I love that. Recently, we’ve had conversations across both the public and private sector about this distinction between brand and individual. What we’re noticing is the nuance between brands telling human stories versus humans telling human stories. That’s a huge difference. A brand speaking on behalf of a person is still a brand, it’s still an agency, it’s still an entity. A person telling that story plugs in beautifully to the idea of intimacy at scale that can be delivered digitally.
You only need to look at things like the Edelman Trust Barometer to see the government has a trust crisis. Leaders, respective authorities in any space, when you look at it at an individual level, that’s where trust is greatest. And we need to find a way to harness this. I do firmly believe that as part of digital transformation, leaders themselves need to be part of that dialogue. They absolutely need to be a regular voice in that discussion online.
Martin Stewart-Weeks: This is really now coming back to that point in that article you refer to at the beginning that we put together late last year. Leaders have to do this. This is really becoming a key part of their toolkit. I think it will become increasingly unacceptable for people in leadership positions to sort of say, ‘Oh I’ll leave that to my comms people, or somebody else will write a couple of twitter messages for me – I don’t do that kind of thing”. It’s a bit like saying I don’t use a pen or I don’t use a computer. It just isn’t going to be okay, very shortly if it isn’t already, for leaders to effectively say, “Look, that’s just not my gig.” I think it has to be.
Roger Christie: As you were talking, I was thinking there’s something very resonant and very interesting there because it sounds paradoxical doesn’t it: intimacy at scale. It sounds like those two ideas are absolutely contradictory. And yet we do live in a world where we are now engaged with an exploration of new tools and platforms, which absolutely provide that opportunity if you do it.
Martin Stewart-Weeks: As you were talking, an image came back in my mind of old footage of what Franklin Roosevelt as a president used to call I think his fireside chats, which were basically literally him sitting next to his father in the White House, usually on radio, obviously, crackling fire in the background, having a little sort of quiet personal chat on a Sunday night, basically with the entire United States.
So on one level, you’d have to say, good politicians have always strived to find a way to be intimate with their citizens at scale. It is really intriguing. We did it through radio, to some extent we’ve played around with TV, but actually, this digital world is providing a range and sophistication of tools and platforms which we’ve never encountered before to make that paradox work.
It is actually possible, really possible to be intimate with a lot of people at the same time and have a wonderful political, bureaucratic and organisational effect if you’re prepared to learn how to harness these new rhythms and these new tools. They do demand a certain amount from you as a leader but if you’re prepared to step up, they offer you almost untold, unprecedented opportunities for engaging your communities – bearing in mind why that’s important in the first place, to give them a deep sense about what you’re doing on their behalf and why that’s important.
DIGITAL LEADERSHIP IN PRACTICE.
It is actually possible, really possible to be intimate with a lot of people at the same time and have a wonderful political, bureaucratic and organisational effect if you’re prepared to learn how to harness these new rhythms and these new tools. They do demand a certain amount from you as a leader but if you’re prepared to step up, they offer you almost untold, unprecedented opportunities for engaging your communities – bearing in mind why that’s important in the first place, to give them a deep sense about what you’re doing on their behalf and why that’s important.
Victor Dominello | Former Minister for Customer Service and Digital Government
Victor is on LinkedIn regularly, he uses it assiduously. He uses it very carefully. There’s a nice tone about it. And every now and then, there’s a glimpse of the man, Victor Dominello – if you like a bundle of passions and interests that drive him both as a politician and frankly, as a human being. It’s incredibly effective. Look at the number of people who follow him, the number of people who like his posts – this is a sort of audience engagement, intimacy at a scale – is frankly impossible any other way. I think he’s absolutely mastered it and it’s a very impressive thing to watch.
Mike Kaiser | Director General – Department of State Development, Infrastructure, Local Government & Planning, QLD
Another one of them is a bureaucrat, senior Bureaucrat, Mike Kaiser. If you look at the way Mike is using LinkedIn, I think it’s a near perfect lesson in how a very senior and very serious and very significant public leader is using social media to do two or three things. Mike does this always in a way, which I think is deeply respectful of his professional role as a public servant. It’s to do with nothing other than his engagement with and enthusiasm for the issues and the people he works with. It’s not political. It’s not “me, me me”. It’s nothing like that at all. It’s all about the issues.
The human behind the leader.
The first thing he uses it for is to provide insensible and measured ways a little bit of a sense about who Mike Kaiser is. Every now and then you find Mike doing little posts where he infiltrates a little bit of information about the music he’s interested in, his background in the underground headbanging music scene in Queensland in the 1970s – he’s got a really interesting track record. Every now and then there are bits of Mike Kaiser turn up. There’s nothing more engaging than finding out something really interesting about somebody – and he does that.
Not all the time, don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing worse, frankly, than somebody who’s in a position of leadership spending their entire time on LinkedIn or wherever else frankly, telling you all about themselves all the time. It’s pretty much the way not to go. But he does it very well and with some degree of care, and some degree of sophistication.
Small stories connected to the bigger story.
The second thing he does is he uses his LinkedIn narrative to do what we were talking about earlier, which is relatively small, I don’t mean small as in not significant, but relatively small pieces of news, information and ideas which are neatly encapsulated in a relatively short LinkedIn post, usually with a link, always with a human story. He then links these to a bigger agenda, a bigger context. He’s a very, very good and a regular contributor with a stream of engagement and communication where you come to, overtime, really build up a sense that you’re beginning to get to know this guy.
What’s important to him.
The third thing he does really well: he uses his platform to explain what’s important to him in his work around the big policy goals and priorities for the state of Queensland and to some extent, Australia as a nation. I remember when he was the head of the resources department, which is the department he was leading just before his current role, Mike spent a lot of his LinkedIn posts explaining why a resources department in the contemporary context was such an important part of the shift and the transmission for the economy, the mining of rare minerals etc. He explained it really well in the context of the big public agendas that he knew very well people were worried about. Pollution, the green economy, jobs, all that kind of stuff.
Final takeaway.
Roger Christie: Looking at the above examples, there’s both intimacy in context and intimacy at scale. I think that’s the sweet spot. If people working across the public sector can find that sweet spot between what is on their agenda, what they’re on the hook for, and what matters to them personally – and then harnessing the digital channels where people are to listen, connect and engage – that’s where the opportunity lies. That’s the sweet spot that everyone can plug into.
Feel free to drop Roger Christie a note with any thoughts from this conversation. If you want more on all things digital reputation, be sure to subscribe below to the Your Digital Reputation newsletter. Join hundreds of subscribers from around the world already signed up!
